Avast Mail Shield raises graphics card idle power draw (fixed by new driver)

Rundvleeskroket · 2017-04-14T04:21:53.000Z

Hi. This is a weird one:

I’m running the latest Avast Free Antivirus (version 17.3.2291, build 17.3.3443.0) and the latest driver for my graphics card (GeForce 381.65) on an up to date Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. I’ve noticed something odd:

My graphics card (GTX 1070) normally idles at around 7% TDP power draw, as measured by MSI Afterburner. But, after checking my mail (in Thunderbird), the idle power draw jumps to 10% and remains there until I reboot my PC.

I think I have traced this back to Avast. Because if I open Avast and go to Settings → Components → Mail Shield, and disable Mail Shield, the exact same thing happens. The idle draw jumps by 3% and remains there until reboot. Re-enabling Mail Shield does not change this. The power draw remains high, even if Thunderbird is closed and not running in the background / hasn’t even been started since boot.

So somehow Mail Shield seems to influence my graphics card. Raising power draw by about 3% permanently until a reboot. This makes my idle GPU temp climb over 10 degrees C, and that in turn is enough to have the GPU idle temp sit right at the limit where the fan will kick in to cool it back down again. So Avast effectively makes my PC go from nearly silent, to loud.

I hope this can be fixed.

Eddy · 2017-04-14T08:45:00.000Z

avast doesn’t make a system loud, only moving components can do so

Is at the moment the power usage goes up any increase in CPU use of one of the avast processes ?

Rundvleeskroket · 2017-04-14T09:54:17.000Z

CPU is pretty much idle too. All Avast processes show 00% load. The whole CPU is at 00% or 01% load. The very second I toggle the Mail Shield switch, the GPU power usage jumps 3% and stays there. After a reboot it is back down where it should be.

Eddy · 2017-04-14T10:04:59.000Z

I suggest to create a support package and have avast take a look at it > https://www.avast.com/faq.php?article=AVKB33

Fijne pasen he

DavidR · 2017-04-14T14:16:06.000Z

Rundvleeskroket post:3:

CPU is pretty much idle too. All Avast processes show 00% load. The whole CPU is at 00% or 01% load. The very second I toggle the Mail Shield switch, the GPU power usage jumps 3% and stays there. After a reboot it is back down where it should be.

That’s weird, I can’t see why the GPU would get involved at all here. I have a pretty crappy Nvidia GeForce GT610 (passive cooling). That when I checked it was using 35MB of GPU RAM and 5% of GPU load, that didn’t change enabling or disabling avast mail shield and checking for email. It did have a spike for a very short time but returned to 0%. I turned the mail shield back on and it went to 1% GPU load and dropped back to 0% after a short time

I used GPU-Z to check that

I know that avast have some really powerful system made up of multiple GPU for analysis in the labs, but I don’t believe they have brought that user systems.

Rundvleeskroket · 2017-04-14T16:47:09.000Z

I’m not talking about GPU load. It is about power consumption of the whole card. Those are two different things.

You don’t seem to have a card and/or version of GPU-Z that monitors both. GPU-Z shows a jump from about 5.5% idle to about 8.5% idle. The same 3% increase. It’s not a spike. It goes up and stays there. That is what causes the card to heat up. GPU Load varies a bit but is generally only a few percent at idle. Mostly 0% to 1%. Not even enough to have the core or memory come of their resting clock speeds.

I don’t know either why this would happen. But it does. So i’m reporting it so hopefully a fix can be found / made. Maybe it’s something weird in the Nvidia driver. But I do find it curious that I can have the idle power draw be normal, doing all sorts of tasks on my PC, for hours on end, but as soon as I check my mail or toggle the Mail Shield in Avast, boom … higher power draw until the next reboot. It really is strange.

Rundvleeskroket · 2017-04-14T17:09:09.000Z

Here is a screen shot of GPU-Z. As you can see I have both a readout of GPU load, and of Power Consumption. The latter is what I mean. That should read about 5% to 6%, not over 8%. It goes up with usage, but comes down at idle, as it should. But with a 3% offset. It now bottoms out 3% higher than normal.

It seems like a small difference. Only a few watts. But that is enough for the card to eventually heat up over 10 degrees C more. The room is very cold right now, about 12C, so idle temps are reasonable. But with the room at a normal temperature the card now idles at over 50C. That is sufficiently close to the point where the fan will kick in, that any light activity that uses the card, such as Google Maps in my browser for instance, will now result in fan noise. Where if the power draw is normal, there is enough headroom that it doesn’t.

I hope this clarifies things a bit

DavidR · 2017-04-14T17:33:59.000Z

Well I would have thought they would be relative, the more load the more power consumption would be required. It is just that on my XP system GPU-Z doesn’t show GPU Power only load.

This win10 laptop does shows both, but only for the Intel (Kaby Lake i5 7200U) CPU integrated graphics chip; it doesn’t show it for the discrete graphics card. For me GPU Power is shown in Watts not percentage. But the only problem is I don’t use avast 17.3.2291 on this system, which is why I checked against my XP system with the latest avast beta 17.4.2292.

I have used GPU-Z I don’t know what you used, so I can’t check that.

EDIT: OK I can see that you have used GPU-Z, I will see if I can replicate that on my XP system, but that may not be possible even though I’m using the same GPU-Z version on both my systems.

EDIT2: I don’t know if the fact you have an older version of GPU-Z 1.11.0 and I have 1.19.0 makes any difference.

Rundvleeskroket · 2017-04-14T17:52:47.000Z

They aren’t strictly relative. I can have a GPU load of 30% but still a Power Consumption of less than 10% (again, with a base idle of ~6%, so barely more). And also with core and memory at idle speed or very near idle speed.

I’m not sure if that means 30% load of idle core speed or 30% of max core speed, but I suspect the first. Would make more sense. The point is: what kind of demand is placed on the GPU makes all the difference as to what the power consumption really is. It can be a light load or a heavy one at the same core speed I think. With vastly different power demands. These modern GPU’s are really clever in their scaling ;D

Edit: I’ve just installed GPU-Z 1.1.9.0 and it shows the exact same readouts.

DavidR · 2017-04-14T18:14:54.000Z

Unfortunately I can’t get any more information out of mine (GPU-Z) for this CPU Core2Duo E8300, which is pretty old. Compared to your GTX 1070 Graphics Card my old Nvidia GeForce GT610 - passive cooling - card is at the other end of the performance scale.

Rundvleeskroket · 2017-04-14T18:20:22.000Z

Well, I used to run SLI GTX 670’s and those gave other readouts also. Not just different values, obviously, but different reported items/sensors. So what GPU-Z can report depends on what the card capabilities are.

My 1070 is also passively cooled, until temps exceed a threshold value, after which the fans kick in, cool the card, and shut down again. One of the reasons I upgraded: silent at idle. But still able to cool actively when needed. But now with this additional power draw at idle the card runs a lot hotter so it is a lot closer to that threshold.

Does Mail Shield somehow leverage hardware acceleration for scanning if available? Unlikely, right?

Rundvleeskroket · 2017-04-15T07:15:13.000Z

Maybe it is the latest Nvidia driver screwing things up. Or a weird interaction with Avast perhaps, and not necessarily Mail Shield per se.

I found that a Flash update I did today also had the same effect. And starting a VM too sometimes. The one that did also has Avast installed in it though. Both before checking my mail.

What I know for sure is that this behaviour started a couple of days ago, and just before that I both updated Avast and my video drivers. So in all likelihood one of those is the culprit, or they somehow clash.

I’ll update when the next driver is released, and when Avast has another update. To see if that fixes it.

DavidR · 2017-04-15T07:51:15.000Z

I’m always wary about updating drivers, as a none gamer I can’t recall the last time I updated a graphics driver (many, many years ago). Obviously this is more crucial for gamers if they want the latest functions/fixes.

Rundvleeskroket · 2017-04-15T08:20:50.000Z

I don’t update with each release, but now that I have a new card there are still bug fixes and performance increases to be had. Not so much with a card that is a few years old.

Sadly Nvidia has started to put telemetry in its drivers. Used to be only in their GFE software, which I don’t install, but now it is in the drivers themselves. So now I have to tear that out after a driver update. Sigh.

DavidR · 2017-04-15T09:21:56.000Z

Graphics drives have always been a pain (for me), they don’t have a seamless install without first having to remove the existing one. For me that isn’t a resipe for success.

I’m of the old school (for drivers) of if it isn’t broken don’t fix it, but these days that seems to have declined.

Rundvleeskroket · 2017-04-15T11:01:29.000Z

These drivers will fail the in place upgrade install also. Clean install works but reset all settings. I found out a while ago that if I kill my firewall (Comodo), the in place install will complete. So that is what I do now. Disable networking, kill firewall, install driver, reboot, enable networking, do clean up. It’s a hassle but hey. I think this driver has a video decoding bug too so hopefully the next one will be better. I agree; if you don’t do anything taxing with your machine, just stick with a driver that works. As long as it doesn’t have security issues.

I’m still curious why my power usage rises when toggling settings in Avast that aren’t remotely related. I don’t like weirdness like that.

DavidR · 2017-04-15T12:49:21.000Z

Rundvleeskroket post:16:

I'm still curious why my power usage rises when toggling settings in Avast that aren't remotely related. I don't like weirdness like that.

I hate mysteries also.

Rundvleeskroket · 2017-04-22T09:31:41.000Z

I just did another test. The jump in power draw happens when I close Thunderbird.

So I can open Thunderbird, check for mail, and send mail. All fine. But exactly when I then close Thunderbird, idle graphics card power draw jumps by 3%. And the steady climb of temperature starts.

Rundvleeskroket · 2017-04-25T22:30:04.000Z

NVidia released a new driver today, and it seems to have fixed the issue. I’m still testing but Thunderbird and Avast Mail Shield settings no longer increase the power consumption of the graphics card.

This is probably what caused the problem:

Bug fix:

GPU idling voltage has increased. [1904229]

Still strange how it didn’t happen at boot, but rather when toggling mail shield. But I’m just glad that this appears to be fixed now

I’ve updated the topic title to reflect the solution.

Eddy · 2017-04-26T02:10:36.000Z

Seems to me the real culprit was the combination of Thunderbird (likely the GUI) + the GPU driver.

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